Psyched Up

by Daniel McGinn

  Connelly, who is 37, describes his role in a game this way: “There’s energy that comes from the players on the field and back to the crowd, and my job is to be the amplifier in between them. . . . If something good happens in the game, you build on that. If something bad happens, you try to move back away from it. It’s basically like making a mixtape. You take the high songs and the low songs, and you try to create this feeling so that nothing is jarring. It’s all about the tone.”

  By all accounts, Connelly is very good at what he does—so much so that in 2013, an executive from the New England Patriots football team asked, “Why can’t our music be more like the music at Fenway?” So the Patriots hired Connelly as a special consultant. He attended a few games and wrote a memo. (His key message: Play a wider variety of songs.) Then the Patriots asked Connelly to DJ a single game on November 24, 2013.

  The opponent was the Denver Broncos, and the game was being televised on Sunday Night Football. The Patriots fumbled on their first three possessions. With two minutes left in the first half, the Pats were down 24-0. The crowd was dead silent.

  Looking out from the DJ booth, Connelly said to the production staff, “We need to get these people dancing.” The producers mocked him: In miserable weather and with the fans booing the hometown team, that’s simply not possible. Connelly smiled, queued up Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” and turned up the volume. Connelly could see the wave of recognition—“Oh, it’s that song”—ripple through the stands. People stood up. Many began singing along. Some danced. “It was perfect,” Connelly says, smiling the way he often does when recalling a moment when he played the perfect song. After halftime, with Connelly spinning songs to keep the crowd on its feet, the Patriots began an epic comeback, ultimately winning on an overtime field goal. A few days after the game, a Patriots’ executive approached Connelly: “Maybe you’d like to come back?”

  In 2014, Connelly became the Patriots’ permanent DJ, while keeping the Fenway Park gig, too. A few months later, the Patriots won their fourth Super Bowl of the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era. There is no proof that Connelly’s choice of music had anything to do with the team’s success that season. But the music is a key element in creating crowd noise and supporting the environment that gives the team its home-field advantage. As anyone who’s experienced that mysterious alchemy when just the right song comes on at just the right time can attest, it surely doesn’t hurt.

  2.

  Getting psyched up is a process of calibrating emotions and adrenaline. There are tools to help. Rituals and superstition, discussed in Chapter Two, are one example. So are pep talks, as described in Chapter Three.

  Music is probably the most ubiquitous tool that performers—especially athletes—use to get ready to compete. Watch a football team (whether NFL or high school) get off the bus, and most players will be wearing headphones. At NBA games, players wear wireless headphones during pregame shootarounds. Many athletes listen to carefully curated playlists of songs designed to motivate, inspire, and energize.

  They are hardly the first people to realize that music can have a beneficial impact on performance. Music has been a part of warfare since the days of the Etruscans, Teutons, and Celts, with drums providing a cadence to march to and a signal to attack. During the Civil War, the Northern and Southern armies employed tens of thousands of musicians. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense remained the single largest employer of musicians in America, with more than six thousand musicians on its payroll.

  But in the last fifteen years, the scientific study of exactly how and why music can help people perform better has become far more extensive and robust. That’s largely due to technology—iPods, smartphones, iTunes, and streaming music services—but that isn’t the only factor. Much of the scientific outpouring has been driven by the energetic work of a single researcher named Costas Karageorghis.

  Karageorghis grew up in South London, in a flat above a used-record store. Each morning he’d wake to the thumping bass resonating up from the store below. As a child, he played a variety of musical instruments and he ran track. At college, he decided to combine his two passions. Now a researcher at Brunel University in London, Karageorghis is the world’s foremost expert on the interplay between music and physical performance. He’s published more than a hundred scientific papers, written three books (including Applying Music in Exercise and Sport), and consulted for companies including Nike and the global sports agency IMG.

  He wasn’t the first to study how music affects athletic performance. He describes a study from 1911 that examined how music from a brass band affected competitors in a New York City bicycle race. But until Karageorghis began his work in the mid-1990s, the field was characterized by researchers who’d do just a study or two and then move to a new topic, and it was plagued by poor methodology. Karageorghis moved the field forward by creating a conceptual framework for how motivational music helps people perform, and then constructing a survey instrument that allowed people to quantify what types of songs they found motivational. He and a colleague also published a two-part “synthesis and review” in which they examined every piece of published research on music and exercise.

  Anyone who’s tried to build his own playlist can benefit from understanding how scientists determine what kind of music is motivational, and exactly how it drives performance. For instance, the papers distinguish between music that’s listened to “pretask” (say, in the locker room before a game), “during task” (during a spinning session or on headphones during a marathon), and “posttask” (while recuperating after an event). The research also distinguishes between the effects of music during “exercise” (a physical activity aimed at improving health) and “sport” (an activity featuring rules and a competitive outcome, that may or may not involve a large amount of physical exertion). Different kinds of songs may work better or worse in these different contexts.

  The research tries to tease out exactly what it is about a piece of music that makes it motivational. It focuses on four components: its rhythm and tempo (measured by, among other things, beats per minute), its musicality (the melody and harmony), its cultural impact (its pervasiveness or general perception in society), and its association (that is, how an individual links a song to a certain life experience, memory, or media representation). The first two qualities, rhythm and musicality, are “intrinsic” qualities that stem directly from the music itself; the latter two are functions of how a piece of music exists within culture, and will differ from person to person. In Karageorghis’s model, rhythm and musicality are the most important drivers of a song’s motivational quality; cultural impact and association are less important. Although academics use a tool to create a numeric score of how motivational a song is, it’s not an objective measurement; different people will find different songs more or less motivational.

  “The key to a motivational track is that it physically energizes, stimulates, and activates,” Karageorghis says. “A piece of music can do this on many different levels. It has to do with tempo or speed. It might have to do with rhythm or accentuation, or melody and lyrical content. . . . Music may also be motivational through a process of classical conditioning, so that a piece of music is associated with motivational imagery.” One of the best examples of that, Karageorghis says, is the music from the Rocky movies; when people hear the songs, they recollect the motivational training montages, and this memory arouses and energize them.

  So if someone is working out and a highly motivating song comes on, what happens? One effect is synchronization, particularly if she’s engaged in a rhythmic activity such as running, rowing, or cycling: a song with the right beats per minute can help pace her movements (steps, strokes) through a workout. (Research by Heather Hoffmann of Knox College has shown this is also true for people who listen to music during sex: The beats per minute of a song affect thrusts per minute during intercourse.) The right music can also improve an exerciser’s mood. It can assist with
arousal control, keeping the athlete “up” and energized, or calm and collected. It can create a sense of dissociation or distraction, in which the athlete’s mind drifts away from the unpleasant sensations of exercise. (This only works up to moderate intensity; nothing can distract someone from a really hard workout.) It can reduce a person’s sense of “perceived exertion”—meaning she will feel like she’s working less hard than she really is. And beyond perceptions, study after study has shown that motivational music can lead to measurably better output and better performance in a variety of exercise settings.

  “In a sense, music can be thought of as a type of legal performance-enhancing drug,” Karaeorghis and his coauthor, David-Lee Priest, write in one study.

  To make use of this drug, Karageorghis suggests that athletes break a workout into different components, such as a stretching, warm-up, mental preparation components, and strength, endurance, and cooldown components, and create special playlists for each one, recognizing how different motivational songs will work better in different places. For rhythmic exercises like running, beats per minute are important, and there are Web sites to help people choose music whose tempo matches the pace they hope to set. Distraction and disassociation may be more important during a grueling endurance or interval training workout; slower, more sedate music can assist with cooldown.

  Karageorghis, who continues to run, does this himself. During stretching and warm-ups, he listens to up-tempo tracks from artists like Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake, and he often circles back to music that was popular when he was a teenager, such as Michael Jackson, because it reminds him of his formative years as an athlete. He doesn’t listen to music while he runs, but during cooldown, he’ll switch to jazz pianist Oscar Peterson or some Miles Davis.

  Like any tool, music can be misused and actually hinder performance. For instance, many athletes listen to music while training even though the sports in which they participate don’t allow music during competition. Running is an example: Serious competitions forbid competitors from wearing headphones. This breaks the cardinal rule of “practice like you’ll play.” Karageorghis also sees too many athletes listening to suboptimal playlists; for instance, many people listen to entire albums by the same artist while exercising, even though the tempo and emotional association differ dramatically from one song to the next. Or he’ll see an athlete who’s prone to nervousness or anxiety listening to highly arousing, stimulating music (for example, the Black Eyed Peas) before a competition, when something that’s likely to be energizing but a bit less agitating (such as Enigma, or even a classical piece) might be better.

  In a few years, Karageorghis hopes to understand even more about how music can help drive performance. Most of what we know to date is based on behavioral experiments, in which people listen to different types of music (and a control group listens to no music at all), perform different activities, and are closely measured, monitored, and compared. That doesn’t give researchers a window into what’s happening in their brains at a neural level, and that’s what Karageorghis hopes to someday discover. “Ultimately what I need is a functional MRI machine that can be used in an exercise environment,” he says. “That would really open up this field and allow me to answer the burning questions.” He hopes that technology may be available in the 2020s.

  3.

  Karageorghis’s reference to the music from Rocky as a motivational masterpiece isn’t a random example. The Rocky theme songs are referenced repeatedly in research on motivational music. For instance, in one 1995 study, two researchers asked pairs of runners who’d posted equal speeds in the past to compete against each other in the 60-meter dash. Before the athletes ran, however, one group stood in silence. The other group listened to the theme from Rocky on headphones. Afterward, the Rocky listeners ran faster. Their heartbeats were quicker, their muscles were tenser, and their anxiety was lower. Listening to just one minute of the Rocky theme song gave them a significant and systematic physiological advantage.

  That phenomenon brought me to a large home in suburban Chicago, where I’m welcomed inside by a sixty-four-year-old man. The front of his black hair is dyed bright purple. He’s wearing a tight leather jacket over a tight chartreuse T-shirt, black acid-washed jeans, and custom-made purple ostrich boots. Around his neck is a gigantic silver pendant of an electric guitar. It looks like he’s dressed to perform at a rock concert, but in fact he has nothing special going on. He dresses like a rock star every day. “I like to stand out,” he says, describing how he employs a tailor who custom-makes his leather clothing.

  Jim Peterik can afford his own leatherworker—as well as the 182 guitars he keeps at home— for a simple reason, one he demonstrates on a white grand piano just off the dining room. He begins playing a familiar series of pounding chords. The song is called “Eye of the Tiger,” and Peterik, who played guitar and keyboards for the band Survivor in the 1980s, cowrote the tune in 1981.

  At the time, Survivor had made a couple of albums and was touring clubs, but it was a struggle. Then Peterik received a message on his answering machine from Sylvester Stallone, who was looking for a theme song for Rocky III. The first two Rocky movies featured orchestral scores by Bill Conti, who won an Oscar for this work. By the early 1980s, Stallone wanted a rock sound track to better appeal to young moviegoers. A music producer friend had played Stallone one of Survivor’s early albums, and he loved the crashing power chords and the strong backbeat.

  Stallone sent Peterik and his writing partner, Survivor guitarist Frankie Sullivan, the first three minutes of Rocky III. It contained an opening montage that introduces the character Clubber Lang (played by the unknown actor Mr. T) and shows how Rocky has gotten soft and rich, filming TV commercials instead of training. The scenes were set to the Queen song “Another One Bites the Dust,” but Stallone couldn’t convince Queen to license the rights. The songwriters looked at each other. “How are we going to top that?”

  On his guitar, Peterik began playing the same note in metronomic sixteenths, a sound he calls “digga-digga-digga-digga,” which is meant to simulate the jittery heartbeat of someone who’s excited. Stopping and starting the film, they worked out a series of abrupt chord changes timed precisely to the punches in the opening boxing scene. Then they stalled out. Since they’d viewed only three minutes of film, they didn’t know enough about the story to write lyrics, so they begged Stallone to send the entire movie. Grudgingly, he did.

  As Peterik and Sullivan watched the complete film, the pivotal moment came in a scene after Rocky has lost a fight to Clubber Lang, and his longtime manager, Mickey, has died. While Rocky reflects in a darkened gym where he once trained, Apollo Creed, his opponent in the first two Rocky movies, enters and offers his analysis of why Rocky lost. “When we fought, you had the eye of the tiger, man, the edge. Now you gotta get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning,” Apollo says. “Maybe we could win it back together. Eye of the tiger, man.”

  Peterik and Sullivan started writing lyrics around the phrase. As an opening line, Sullivan suggested: “Back on the street, doing time, taking chances.” Peterik explained to me how he rewrote and expanded that snippet to become: “Rising up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances. Went the distance, now I’m back on the street, just a man, and his will to survive.” “That came like one lump, pretty much,” he recalls. At the time, Peterik was a jogger, so over the next few days he jogged around his neighborhood in La Grange, Illinois, stopping to write down song lyrics on a notepad he kept in his gym shorts. A few days later, the band convened at a Chicago studio to record a demo. Stallone loved it.

  The band rented tuxedos to attend the Hollywood premier in May 1982, but it wasn’t until the film opened back home in La Grange that Peterik realized how big the song could be. “It was the second day Rocky III was in theaters, and the place was packed. I sat in the back row all alone. When the song hit, the place went up like a rock concert
.”

  It was just the right song, at just the right moment.

  “Eye of the Tiger” hit number one and won a Grammy, which sits upstairs in Peterik’s home recording studio. It made Survivor famous, and they followed with up with a series of hits: “I Can’t Hold Back,” “High on You,” “Burning Heart,” “The Search Is Over.”

  When I interviewed Peterick, “Eye of the Tiger” was thirty-three years old, and Peterik tries to explain what makes it the most iconic psych-up song of all time. He rejects the notion that it’s entirely because of the Rocky tie-in: Since iTunes launched in 2001, “Eye of the Tiger” has been downloaded nearly six million times, and Peterik argues that many of the people buying the song today are too young to have watched Rocky III. He’s arguing, in the language of the academic theorists, that the song’s appeal is due to its intrinsic musicality, not just to its emotional association with an uplifting movie.

  Peterik believes the unusually long intro is a key. Most rock songs jump to the lyrics quickly, but this intro lasts more than thirty seconds, with the combination of the digga-diggas and the power chords give listeners a period in which they can get excited for the lyrics that follow. The lyrics, which focus on struggle, conflict, and rivalry, could apply to any range of performance pursuits. “They’re very anthemic words,” he says.

  Today rehab hospitals use “Eye of the Tiger” to motivate stroke victims undergoing physical therapy. He’s talked with CEOs who listen to it before board meetings. In a New York magazine essay about her pregnancy, one woman recalled how she had her doctor play the song at the precise moment she was artificially inseminated, to psych her uterus up to conceive.

  The songwriter admits that if he knew exactly what it was about “Eye of the Tiger” that keeps it on so many workout playlists, he’d have had more luck writing another song like it. In fact, Stallone asked him to write the theme for Rocky IV, but “Burning Heart” didn’t catch on as widely.